Today in the 1770s: July 12

WILLIAMSBURG, July 12, 1775.
It having been asserted, and industriously propagated, that some little time before the late meeting of the merchants, in conversation with a person at my own house, I said that the merchants would not meet, because they were afraid of being robbed of their money by Patrick Henry and his followers: I take this opportunity to declare, upon my honour, that I never said or thought any such thing, and that the person who charges me with uttering such expressions must have mistaken my words, or inferred from them a meaning never intended by
JOHN RANDOLPH.

About this entry:

John Randolph was a Tory, and not a friend to Patrick Henry. Lord Dunmore described him a few months earlier in a letter to Lord Dartmouth, "The Attorney General has been very unpopular in this, his native, Country, ever since the Stamp Act", the enforcement of which he had refused to oppose. Randolph left Virginia in September of 1775 for England, where he died in 1784 at the age of 56.

About

Intended to provide a glimpse into the breadth of subject matter in the Gazette, excerpts from the 18th-century Virginia Gazette have been chosen for every day of the year and annotated by staff of the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library.

Each entry reflects an event that
happened on a particular day (or something published on a particular day).